Nvidia Tegra

Technical mistakes? Haven't seen any

*shrug*

 

Given the demonstrations of ~100 fps timedemo on Moorestown shown by Intel I'd agree with you.

PS. where the fuck is Moorestown?

 

The driver optimisations aren't meant for Q3a but for SGX cores in GL benchmark2.0. Moorestown is clocked at 400MHz and considering it's mostly fill-rate limited it's fairly natural that it would give roughly twice the results of a SGX540@200MHz (since both 535 and 540 have 2 TMUs each). Moorestown at 400MHz reaches roughly 60fps average under 1080p.

Moorestown is lost in Intel's weird platform decisions I'd say.

 

I'm not sure about the precise timing, but Renesas *might* have beat NVIDIA to sampling the first quad-core Cortex-A9 for handhelds. I thought their previously-hinted-at next-gen application processor would be dual-core, but this die shot(!) clearly indicates otherwise: http://www.renesasmobile.com/technology/ap-cpu.html

Theoretically there should also be a SGX543MP2 on there, but I'm not sure where (probably on the left, maybe bottom?) - not that we should bring this thread too OT.

 

Hmmm...I've had a suspicion for a while now that Renesas is supplying the Soc for the NGP, and that die shot re-enforces it.

 

Maybe, just to be clear that die shot is definitively from a standard SoC targeted at smartphones though, not the custom NGP SoC.

 

Of course, but it does prove that the've been "quad-core"-ing for quite a while, and Renesas is publicly using SGX543 (although in an MP2 configuration).

 

Sure, although consider that Apple was selecting the IP for their iPhone/iPod SoCs even back when Samsung was doing most of the synthesis work. I would be very very surprised if any choice by Renesas could influence Sony in any way. On the other hand, a choice by Sony might influence Renesas if they are indeed responsible for the SoC.

 

The headline of that page doesn't limit to anything like just smart-phones.

NECs NaviEngine is using a quad-core ARM11: http://www2.renesas.com/news/en/archive/0710/0201.html quad-core CPUs on Car Navigation systems aren't all that new either. I'd say that considering those systems rely heavily on multiple simultaneous streams for in car navigation a quad core CPU is essential these days.

 

I have to say, after seeing the results of the Optimus 2X with Tegra and Optimus 3D with OMAP 4, Tegra 2 graphics seem a bit underpowered to me. If Mali 400 performance is due to drivers, then Tegra 2 seems like it will have among the weakest graphics of all the dual core SoC's (donno about Broadcom, Freescale and ST-Ericsson though)

From Anandtech - http://www.anandtech.com/show/4181/...re-a9s-coming-to-smartphonestablets-this-year

"NVIDIA got the first silicon back from the fab 12 days ago. While the chip may end up being called Tegra 3 or some variation of that, for now NVIDIA refers to it as Project Kal-El. Named after young superman (or Nicholas Cage's son), Kal-El will be sampling this year and shipping in devices as early as August 2011"

Edit: I really wasn't expecting it to be on 40nm though, i thought they had gone for 28 nm

 

ST-Ericsson's U8500 is only using a single-core Mali-400 so you can count on it not being a contender.

 

While Freescale's offering will outpower Tegra 2, it's also a significantly newer solution.

Tegra 2's graphics were always at a marginal disadvantage compared to a comparable SGX540, so placing behind OMAP4 was expected.

Broadcom has a nice solution with their VideoCore architecture; how it plays out will be interesting to see.

nVidia is just out-executing the competition on keeping each iteration to an aggressive development schedule, so they're dangerous for that reason primarily.